Recipients of Inaugural Value Assessment Challenge Awards Announced

The PhRMA Foundation announced the recipients of its inaugural Challenge Awards during a special briefing at Morning Consult in Washington, D.C. September 21, 2017. These awards recognize the best and the brightest leaders and institutions that are identifying transformative solutions to measure value in health care and advance a value-driven health care system.

The Challenge Awards are the first phase in the multi-year Value Assessment Initiative that will award more than $1 million to advance the field of value assessment.

It has been estimated that more than 30 percent of health care spending in the U.S. is wasteful. Low-value care, which drives up costs unnecessarily while increasing patient risk, is a significant component of this wasteful spending. Altarum’s winning paper summarizes and critiques existing methods that measure low-value care and describes an integrated framework that combines multiple methods to comprehensively estimate and track the magnitude and principal sources of clinical waste. Read the paper.

National Eczema Association: “Improving Value for Eczema Patients”

With the cost of chronic diseases now representing a majority of spending in the United States health care system, a reliable model to measure value is critical to identify replicable improvement methods. The National Eczema Association’s (NEA) plan to establish a Shared Decision Making Resource Center is a transformative strategy that can evaluate value of health care interventions for eczema patients to advance a value-driven health care system in the U.S. Read the paper.

SECOND PLACE:

National Health Council and University of Maryland School of Pharmacy: “Emerging Good Practices for Transforming Value Assessment: Patients’ Voices, Patients’ Values”

Most U.S. value frameworks and subsequent assessments are developed with little to no patient engagement. The National Health Council (NHC) started a value workgroup in 2016 to change this. In the past two years, patient advocacy group engagement with value framework developers and assessors has increased, with groups reporting both positive experiences and challenges in their interactions. The NHC will use these early experiences can help recommend emerging good practices that can eventually get the field to implement standards for patient engagement. Read the paper.

Patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) are tools that assess patient perspectives on their health without interpretation by any other parties, and they are key tools in clinical research. The integration of electronically-delivered PROMs in clinical practices can dramatically change health outcomes by influencing decision-making. The authors of this paper propose that the implementation of generic and disease/condition specific PROMs across health care systems will advance a value-driven health care system.